Irish Freedom during
the eight months extending from June 1913 to January 1914. They thus
form a contemporary commentary on the period immediately preceding and
covering the rise of the Irish Volunteers: a period which, when things
assume their proper perspective, will probably be regarded as the most
important in recent Irish history. I commenced the series with the
deliberate intention, by argument, invective, and satire, of goading
those who shared my political views to commit themselves definitely to
an armed movement. I felt quite sure that the hour was ripe for such a
movement, but did not in the beginning foresee the precise form it was
to assume. When I wrote the article for November 1913 a group of
Nationalists with whom I was in touch had decided to found the Irish
Volunteers, and we were looking about for a leader who would command the
adhesion of men less advanced than we were known to be: of our own
followers we were sure. When I wrote the article for December 1913, Eoin
MacNeill had (quite unexpectedly) published his article The North Began
in An Claidheamh Soluis, and we had agreed to invite him to put himself
at our head. The rest is a part of Irish history. In the article for
August 1913, I have omitted part of the Open Letter to Douglas Hyde; and
I have made one or two verbal changes in a few of the other articles.
P. H. Pearse.St. Enda'S College,
The Hermitage, Rathfarnham,
1st June, 1915.

From a Hermitage
(June 1913)

Not everyone that lives in a hermitage is a hermit. And not every
hermit is hermit hearted. As for me, I have only two qualities in common
with the real (or imaginary) hermit who once lived (or did not live) in
this place: I am poor and I am merry. Now, all hermits are poor, and all
hermits, unless they are frauds, are merry. I am visibly poor, but am
merry only in an esoteric or secret sense, exhibiting to the outer world
an austerity of look and speech more befitting my habitation than my
heart. Understand that, however harshly I may express myself in the
comments and proposals I shall from time to time make here, I am in
reality a genial and large-hearted person, and that if I chasten my
fellows it is only because I love them.

I have, as I have suggested, some proposals to make. The first is that we who are
determined to rehabilitate this nation should commence working towards
that end instead of arguing. The Nationalist movement in Ireland has
degenerated into a debating society. In all our national or
quasi-national organs we argue as to what a nation is, what nationality,
what a Nationalist. As if definitions mattered! Our love of disputation
sometimes makes us indecent, as when we argue over a dead man's coffin
as to whether he was a Nationalist or not, and sometimes makes us
ridiculous, as when we prove by a mathematical formula that the poet who
has most finely voiced Irish nationalism in our time is no Nationalist.
As if a man's opinions were more important than his work! I propose that
we take service as our touchstone, and reject all other touchstones; and
that, without bothering our heads about sorting out, segregating, and
labelling Irishmen and Irishwomen according to their opinions, we agree
to accept as fellow-Nationalists all who specifically or virtually
recognise this Irish nation as an entity and, being part of it, owe it
and give it their service. This willsave endless discussion, and make
it wholly unnecessary to inquire, before giving a fellow-Irishman one's
hand, what is his attitude towards bimetallism or what his opinion of

The Playboy of the Western World.

This thing of service merits to be
dwelt upon. Ireland, in our day as in the past, has excommunicated some
of those who have served her best, and has canonised some of those who
have served her worst. We damn a man for an unpopular phrase; we deify a
man who does a mean thing gracefully. The word to us is ever more
significant than the deed. When a man like Synge, a man in whose sad
heart there glowed a true love of Ireland, one of the two or three men
who have in our time made Ireland considerable in the eyes of the world,
uses strange symbols which we do not understand, we cry out that he has
blasphemed and we proceed to crucify him. When a sleek lawyer, rising
step by step through the most ignoble of all professions, attains to a
Lord Chancellorship or to an Attorney-Generalship, we confer upon him
the freedom of our cities. This is really a very terrible symptom in
contemporary Ireland. It is not for me to judge the Redmond Barrys
and the Ignatius O'Briens and the Thomas F. Moloneys, and I say no word
in condemnation of them here: I merely point out that they have not in
any way served Ireland—they have served themselves and they have served
England; and when England rewards them for their service there is
absolutely no reason why Ireland should rejoice. A bargain has been
completed. Servants of England have done their day's work and been paid
their price. It is a commercial transaction, not a matter of public
rejoicing. It is a business between England and these men. Ireland has
nothing to do with it.

When such commercial transactions are
concluded I think the less said about them the better. I would not
pursue these men as traitors, for I do not think they were ever with us.
But I do think that an effort should be made to prevent rebel cities
like Cork from honouring their mean success. Is it too late, even now,
to expunge their names from the roll of freemen? Let someone in Cork
look to it.

This generation of Irishmen will be called upon in
the near future to make a very passionate assertion of nationality. The
form in which that assertion shall be made must depend upon many things,
more especially upon the passage or non-passage of the present Home Rule
Bill. In the meantime there is need to be vigilant. Yet, every day we
allow insults to the nation to pass, forgetting that every fresh stripe
endured by a slave makes him so much more a slave. There comes to a
slave, as there comes to a tortured child or to a tortured animal, a
time when stripes seem normal and it is easier to endure than to
protest. Any underling of British government can now lay hands on
Ireland with impunity; only now it is no longer necessary to deal heavy
stripes—a delicate and facetious slap in the face is a sufficient symbol
of over-lordship. One Mr. Justice Boyd sneered at the Irish language
from the Bench in Belfast a few weeks ago; one would have thought that
there were enough Gaels in Belfast to prevent the fellow from being
heard in his own court the next day until he had apologised. The
National Council of Sinn Fein recently sent an anti-enlisting car
through the streets of Dublin. It was seized by the police and the
posters defaced. Afterwards the excuse was tendered that the cart
exceeded the size allowed by the Corporation for advertisement vans. The
National Council promptly sent another anti-enlisting car, of regulation
size, into the streets, and at present it parades unmolested. But there
should have been enough spirit in Dublin to enable the National Council
to send a whole procession of anti-enlisting cars into the streets. And,
had these been seized, a hundred sandwich men should have appeared with
anti-enlisting posters. And, had these been interfered with, Nationalist
citizens should have set out for business the next morning with
anti-enlisting badges in their buttonholes. Should the police have
disliked the aesthetic effect of this decoration, neat anti-enlisting
flags might have appeared in citizens' hat-bands. Should all sartorial
eccentricities have been objected to, Nationalist Dublin could have
started whistling some tune agreed upon and recognised to mean
anti-enlisting. There are countless ways in which such an agitation
might be carried on, for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland.
Once for all, if there is to be an anti-enlisting movement, let there be
an anti-enlisting movement. Opinions may differ as to the advisability
of such a movement, but there can be no two opinions as to the
inadvisability of playing at such a movement.

I am aware that some of
the courses I recommend are open to the objection that they would land
some people in gaol. But gaol would do some people good.

(JULY 1913)

Symbols are very important. The symbol of a true thing, of a
beneficent thing, is worthy of all homage; the symbol of a false thing,
of a cruel thing, is worthy of all reprobation. A gibbet has come to be
the noblest symbol in the world, because it symbolises the noblest thing
that has ever been done among men. The red coat of a soldier, a gallant
thing in itself, has come to be a symbol of unspeakably evil import,
because such unspeakable things have been done by the empire for which
the red-coated soldiers fight, such murders perpetrated, such tyrannies
upheld for centuries. Thus, a shameful thing may come to have a glorious
significance, a ridiculous thing may achieve venerability, while a
goodly thing may become so degraded that the stomach of a strong man
heaves when he looks upon it. Consider this: if a man were to walk down
O'Connell Street wearing a double-pointed conical hat a full foot high
and of a glaring yellow colour, we should laugh; yet when a man mounts
the steps of an altar with a hat of that precise pattern on his head we
are dumb and reverent, for we see in the preposterous headgear the awful
symbol of apostolic succession. This matter of symbols came into my mind
to-day as I watched a Bishop administer Confirmation. The Church to
which I belong, the wise Church that has called into her service all the
arts, knows better than any other institution, human or divine, the
immense potency of symbols: with symbols she exorcises evil spirits,
with symbols she calls into play for beneficent purposes the infinite
powers of omnipotence. And those of her children who honour not her
symbols she pronounces anathema.

A nation should exact similar
respect for its symbols. Free nations do. They salute their flags with
bared heads; they hail with thundering cannon the nincompoops that
happen to be their kings. A man with whom you would not sit at meat if
he were a private individual, whom you would cut every time you saw him
approaching you in the street, receives your homage, and justly receives
your homage, when he symbolises the majesty of your nation. A man whom,
as an individual, you would consider too insignificant to be an object
of your dislike, becomes an object of holy hatred when he symbolises
some evil thing that oppresses you or yours. No one in Ireland either
likes or dislikes George Wettin; yet every true man of Ireland hates, or
should hate, to see his not very intellectual features on a coin or on a
stamp, for they symbolise there the foreign tyranny that holds us. A
good Irishmanshould blush every time he sees a penny. A good Irish
man should tingle with shame every time he sees a red coat.

I
know an old woman who never passes a soldier without railing at him. As
a girl she made bullets for the Fenians, moulding them out of the leaden
lining of tea cases. During the half century that has gone by, while our
fathers and we have been parleying with the English, she has cherished
in her heart an enduring hate. I saw her a few weeks ago as she went by
the Wellington Barracks on her way to the Wolfe Tone Aeridheacht, and as
she passed the sentry at the gate she paused and said something bitter
to him. I would not have done that. I could not even if I would. Neither
could you. A strong man would regard it as futile; a man with a sense of
humour would regard it as ridiculous, just as most men regard the
demonstrations of the Suffragettes. Yet I think the women are right and
not we. At the root of that old woman's demonstration against the stolid
sentry was an instinct profoundly true. She is in revolt against the
evil thing that holds her country, and of that evil thing the sentry is
the symbol. She isan unconquered soul, one of the few unconquered souls
in Ireland. She has not made peace, and will never make peace. She has
never even parleyed. It were wrong to laugh at her little feeble
demonstration against the soldier. I do not call for demonstrations
against soldiers until we are able to do more than demonstrate; but the
fact that we pass them by every day, every hour, without grinding our
teeth is symptomatic of our loss of manhood. We no longer feel their
presence here a reproach.

Of the nation's symbols the most august
is her language, and it is a measure of Ireland's degradation that she
can endure to see her language derided by a Mr. Justice Boyd and that
she can discuss the propriety of selling it for £10,000 a year to a Mr.
Secretary Birrell. Ireland has lost the sense of shame. Her inner
sanctities are no longer sacred to her. Keating (whom I take to be the
greatest of Irish Nationalist poets) used a terrific phrase of the
Ireland of his day: he called her the harlot of England. Yet Keating's
Ireland was the magnificent Ireland in which Rory O'More planned and
OwenRoe battled. What would he say of this Ireland? His phrase if
used to-day would no longer be a terrible metaphor, but would be a more
terrible truth; a truth literal and exact. For is not Ireland's body
given up to the pleasure of another, and is not Ireland's honour for
sale in the market- places.

As long as Ireland is unfree the only
honourable attitude for Irishmen and Irish women is an attitude of
revolt. It is base of us to be quiescent. It is base not only for the
nation, but for each individual in the nation: each of us is guilty of a
personal baseness, each of us suffers a personal stigma, as long as this
thing endures. When we go to Wolfe Tone's grave next Sunday we should
remember with bitterness that we suffer the ignominy which he died
rather than endure. If we mean to go on suffering it, we have no
business going in pilgrimage to that dead man's grave. If we do not
really mean to carry on his work, why disturb the quiet of Bodenstown
with protestations?

I said last month that this generation of
Irishmen will be called upon in the nearfuture to make a very
passionate assertion of nationality, and that the form which that
assertion shall take must depend largely upon the passage or non-passage
of the present Home Rule Bill. If the Home Rule Bill passes I imagine
that the assertion I speak of will be made by the creation of what we
may call a Gaelic party within the Home Rule Parliament with a strong
following behind it in the country; a party which shall determinedly set
about the rehabilitation of this nation, resting not until it has
eliminated every vestige of foreign interference with its concerns. If
the Home Rule Bill does not pass (and those who are offering an
instalment of liberty to Ireland are proving such bad guardians of
liberty in their own country that it is doubtful whether their own
countrymen will retain them in office sufficiently long to allow them to
pass Home Rule), the assertion must be made in other ways: I believe
that if we who hold the full national faith have but the courage to step
forward we shall succeed more easily than most people suppose in gaining
the people's adhesion to our ideals and our methods—lesser ideals having
proved unattainable and wiser methods more foolish.

(AUGUST 1913)

Once I knew a Bishop who used to devote the greater part of his spare
time to writing Limericks in competition for prizes offered by
newspapers. You will find it difficult to imagine a Bishop writing
Limericks. One imagines a Bishop in his spare hours writing biblical
commentaries or cultivating a neat garden in which the characteristic
flower is lily-of-the-valley. And yet my Bishop was a saint. The not
very apostolic occupation of his leisure had its origin in an apostolic
simplicity and charity. The Bishop had a little niece of whom he was
very fond, and the ambition of the little niece's life was to win one of
the large prizes offered by London newspapers for clever Limericks. The
good Bishop sent in a vast number of Limericks in his niece's name, and
if he or she won a prize (which, I am sorry to say, neither of them ever
did), half the money was to be spent in sending the little niece on a
pilgrimage to Lourdes and the other half to be given to the Society
of St. Vincent de Paul. If I had not learned all this from a friend of
the little niece's I might have set down the Limerick writing (for some
of the Limericks were very bad) as a reprehensible eccentricity on the
part of an otherwise excellently behaved Bishop.

At that time I was
not a hermit, and was not versed in the wise foolishness of saints. From
the Bishop's and from other instances I have since elaborated this piece
of wisdom: when a good man does an inexplicable thing there is always a
motive creditable to his goodness. Men's follies are often more
symptomatic of their virtues than of their vices. Apply this to those
round about you, in your home, in your office, in your organisation:
apply it to the busy-bodies and the fools who appear to be making a mess
of everything you are interested in, from your breakfast to your
country, and you will come to respect them for their very blunders, to
love them for their lunacy. You prefer your eggs well boiled. Your wife
insists on serving them to you half raw. This is not perverseness on her
part: she knows that the albumen of eggs when solidified is highly
indigestible and when swallowed hastily every morning, and washed down
with tea, will assuredly induce appendicitis. You hate to sit in a
draught. The man whose stool is next you in your office insists on
keeping a window open from which an atmospheric stream constantly
impinges upon your thinly thatched cranium. This is not cruelty on his
part: he knows (being a reader of Lady Aberdeen's

Slainte) that you are
tubercular, and that fresh air is the only thing that will kill the
germs. You are a member of the Gaelic League. A friend and colleague
writes to the press to point out that you are selling the League to the
Liberals and that your reward will be a title. This is not a damned lie:
it is his way of hinting that you ought to be a little more strenuous,
to smite a little harder and a little oftener, to keep up perpetually a
sort of Berserker rage or riastral in the way of the old heroes. It is
his crude, inartistic, modern notion of playing Laegh to your
Cuchulainn. The bravest hero of the Gael had to endure being called a
little fairy phantom by his charioteer. Were he fighting at the Ford
to-day he would be called a Do-Nothing. When Cuchulainn was reviled by
Laegh he did not turn round and fell him. He fought on the harder
against the foe of his country.

I love and honour Douglas Hyde. I
have served under him since I was a boy. I am willing to serve under him
until he can lead and I can serve no longer. I have never failed him. He
has never failed me. I am only one of many who could write thus, who at
this moment are thinking thus. But probably my service has been longer
than that of most, for it began when I was only sixteen; and perhaps it
has been more intimate than that of all but a very few, for I have been
in posts that required constant communication with him for fifteen
years. It has, too, been my privilege to be the first fosterer of many
who are now serving under him—pupils of mine, now pupils of his in the
National University or young workers in the Gaelic League; and these
form a new bond between him and me. Thus by service given and service
received I have earned the right to say here the things I am about to
say. I can speak to him at once as friend to friend and as loyal
soldier to loyal captain.

Or rather, since it has become the fashion
to write Open Letters to Douglas Hyde, I will write him an Open Letter.
I will commence: My dear Hyde,—Among God's gracious gifts to you,
perhaps the most gracious, at any rate the most useful, is your gift of
humour. You have always had a great Homeric laugh. I call upon you to
laugh it now. I could show you much matter for laughter in these noises
and irrelevancies that disturb you…Laugh, my dear Craoibhin. Laugh
your great genial laugh. It will ease the situation. Bulfin used to say
that O'Daly's smile would split the ceiling at 24 Upper O'Connell
Street. Let your laughter shake the Clock Tower in Earlsfort
Terrace.The Clock Tower, I observe, has since collapsed.

To be quite serious, laughter is what is required
just now. A shout of laughter that will roll out from the Ard-Fheis at
Galwaytill it re-echoes from the cliffs of Aran and reverberates
through the stony solitudes of Burren. Why all this passion of invective
when laughter will solve the difficulty? Let us laugh. Laughter is the
one gift that God has given to men but denied to brutes and angels.
Laughter is the crowning grace of the heroes. The epic tells how the
dying Cuchulainn noticed that a raven which had stooped to drink his
blood, becoming entangled in the clotted gore, was ludicrously upset.
Then Cuchulainn, knowing that it was his last laugh, laughed
aloud. I think that Emmet, I am quite sure that Tone, would have
laughed in similar circumstances.

For my own part, I have found the
need of laughter in order to preserve my sanity. And you, Craoibhin,
have counselled sanity. There is one piece of sanity that I have learned
from being a schoolmaster. Always remember that in a school you have to
deal with boys, not cherubim. An enthusiastic teacher often makes the
mistake of forming an ideal picture of schoolboy virtue, and is shocked
and disheartened when he finds that his actual pupils fall far below his
ideal.
You have, for instance, a little pupil with a virginal face. You say
to yourself, This boy will surely never buy cigarettes in the forbidden
shop at the corner, or steal into the garden when the apples are ripe.
You come upon him some day in the walk through the wood, and as you
approach he hastily conceals a cigarette; you enter the garden in autumn
time, and you notice a slight figure with the face of a saint making a
dash from the place where the apple-trees are. You are angry with the
boy, but it is with yourself you should be angry, or rather you should
laugh at yourself for a blunderer. The boy has only proved himself a
boy, whereas you have proved yourself a goose. Instead of taking down
the boy's trousers, you ought to take down the impossible image you had
so foolishly erected.

I wonder whether this schoolmaster's wisdom
might not be of service to Dr. Hyde. He must try to remember that those
around him are men, not archangels. They are men with all the little
lovable and unlovable weaknesses of men, and without any of the vision
and strength of angels. And he must try to forgive them and to imagine
that they mean well even when they act badly; that sometimes at the
bottom of their blundering there may be a grain of sense; and that often
their fury is only a slightly diseased love of the cause we all serve.
And perhaps human causes are best served by men with human strength and
human weaknesses. Archangels are fitted to go upon the mighty embassies
of God, not to do the little paltry tasks of human life. Archangels are
at home in the shining spaces of heaven, not in the habitations and
committee rooms of earth. Curious as it seems, we ridiculous men, with
all our faults and all our follies, are very capable where angels might
fail. Angelic attributes might hinder us in our humble and humdrum but
necessary little careers. The inconveniences of being angels on earth
would be dreadful. As we sat on our old stools, as we gathered round the
table of our committee room, where, for instance, should we tuck in our
wings? The buildings would have to be enlarged. In point of fact, a
heaven would be necessary to our comfort. But this is earth. And so we
are back at our first position that we must put up with our human world
and with the human material we have got, until we are all translated and
become members of the eternal committee and delegates to the Ard-Fheis
of God.

Thus much to Dr. Hyde. To those on whose behalf I appeal
to his magnanimity I say only this: O ye of little sense, know ye not
when ye have got a good captain for a good cause? And know ye not that
it is the duty of the soldier to follow his captain, unfaltering,
unquestioning, seeing obedience in the bond of rule? If ye know not
this, ye know not the first thing that a fighting man should know.

(SEPTEMBER 1913)

I have been considering the ways of chafers and dragon-flies. During the
long summer they are my only entertainment in this wilderness. The
dragon-flies make a pageant for me in the noon tide splendour: the
chafers are my orchestra in the dusky evening. Marbhén before me was
similarly attended:
Swarms of bees and chafers, the little musicians of the world,A gentle chorus.
Your beetle has in him many of the contradictions of the artist. In
seemly black, he appeals to you as shy and retiring; suddenly, while you
are sympathetically examining him, he splits up the middle, shocking you
at first with the indecency of the act, but soon displays hidden wings
as though he were an angel in disguise, and then, waving wild arms
(like a Yeats making a speech), whirls into ecstasies, and is gone with
multitudinous and iridescent whirr of wings and wing-cases. This is
nature's symbolling forth of the divina insania of the poets. It were
perhaps too curious to assign certain beetles to certain poets and
dramatists as their types and figures, associating for instance the
Necydalis Major, long and graceful, with Mr. Yeats, the familiar
Coccinella, pleasant and comfortable looking, with Lady Gregory, theCreophilus Maxillosus, a creature which haunts drains and feeds on
garbage (and which I take to be the beetle celebrated in a well known
passage of Keating), with Mr. George Moore.

Upon the dragon-fly a literature might be written. The dragon-fly is one
of the most beautiful and terrible things in nature. It flashes by you
like a winged emerald or ruby or turquoise. Scrutinise it at close
quarters and you will find yourself comparing its bulky little round
head, with its wonderful eyes and cruel jaws, to the beautiful, cruel
head of a tiger. The dragon-fly among insects is in fact as the tiger
among beasts, as the hawk among birds, as the shark among fish, as the
lawyer among men, as England among the nations. It is the destroyer,
the eater-up, the cannibal. Two dragon-flies will fight until nothing
remains but two heads. So ferocious an eater-up is the dragon-fly that
it is said that, in the absence of other bodies to eat up, it will eat
up its own body until nothing is left but the head, and it would
doubtless eat its own head if it could; a feat which would be as
remarkable as thefeat of the saint, recorded by Carlyle and recalled by Mitchel, who swam
across the Channel carrying his decapitated head in his teeth. The
dragon-fly is the type of greedy ascendancy—a sinister head preying upon
its own vitals. The largest and most wonderful dragon-flies I have seen
in Ireland haunt the lovely woods that fringe the shore of Lough Corrib,
near Cong. And at Cong, I remember, there is a great lord who has pulled
down many homes in order that no ascending smoke may mar the sylvan
beauty of his landscape.

Of the doings of men only rumours reach me in this solitude. I have
heard faint echoes of laughter at Galway, and am pleased to think that
the Gael has not entirely lost his sense of
humour: a catastrophe which I had feared, for Dr. Hyde had been talking
about his aunt's will and Mr. Griffith had been advising Dr. Hyde as to
how to conduct a movement to success. The Irish-speaking crowd surging
around the brake in Galway square recalls one to the realities of the
movement, and to the field that is lying fallow. I want a missionary, a
herald, an
Irish-speaking John the Baptist, one who would go through
the Irish West and speak trumpet-toned of nationality to the people in
the villages. I would not have him speak of Gaelic Leagues, or of Fees
for Irish, or of Bilingual Programmes, or of Essential Irish in
Universities: I would have him speak of Tone and Mitchel and the Hawk of the Hill and of men dead or in exile for love of the Gael; all in Irish.
In the meantime I welcome Eamonn Ceannt and Bean an Fhir Ruaidh.

Books sometimes find their way to this remote place, and fortunately
books, even very profane books, are not forbidden by my rule. This month
I have received a good book and a bad book. The good book is indeed one
of the holy books of Ireland: no other than John Mitchel's

Jail
Journal, the last gospel of the New Testament of Irish Nationality, as
Wolfe Tone's Autobiography is the first; John Mitchel's Jail Journal
nobly presented, supplemented by an additional chapter of his Out of
Jail Journal, enriched with good notes and portraits, and introduced
by Arthur Griffith in a finely-written
preface. Mr. Griffith speaks of the haughty manhood of
Mitchel. A Man is so rare a phenomenon in Ireland that the appearance of
one takes his generation by surprise and he dies broken-hearted or is
hanged or transported before his people have made up their minds whether
to crown him or to stone him—or simply to ignore him. Mitchel brought
reality into a national movement busy with discussions as our own
movement is busy with discussions to-day. He admits that he
miscalculated: underestimating both the vigour and zeal of the enemy
and the much-enduring patience and perseverance of the Irish. It
comes to this: a Man cannot save his people unless the people themselves
have some manhood. A Man, even if he be a Man-God, will live and die in
vain for all who are voluntary slaves. Christ cannot save you if you
want to be damned: much less can any earthly hero.

I agree with one who holds that John Mitchel is Ireland's greatest
literary figure—that is, of those who have written in English. But I
place Tone above him both as a man and as a leader of men. Tone's
was a broader humanity with as intense a nationality; Tone's was a
sunnier nature with as stubborn a soul. But Mitchel stands next to Tone:
and these two shall teach you and lead you, O Ireland, if you hearken
unto them, and not otherwise than as they teach and lead shall you come
unto the path of national salvation. For this I will answer on the
Judgment Day.

I was wrong in speaking of my second book as a bad book. It is a good
book, lovingly written, but it is spoiled by a profane preface. I am
speaking of Maurice Moore's life of his father and of George Moore's
preface thereto. The soldier has told the facts of his father's life (I
wish he had not called him an Irish Gentleman) simply and well, and
the novelist has tried to suggest that his father was not an Irish
gentleman but an Irish blackguard. Many Irish gentlemen have indeed
been blackguards, but I do not think George Henry Moore was one. In a
mean and difficult time he worked manfully for Ireland; and towards the
end of his life he was willing to become
a Fenian. Blackguards do not generally work manfully for their country
or become Fenians. But it is absurd and unnecessary to defend George
Henry Moore, even against his son. A man's life really speaks for
itself, and requires only such faithful record as George Henry Moore's
has received here from Maurice Moore. No man's life needs a Defensio or
an Apologia, and I am often sorry to see men really great and simple go
to such pains to explain themselves: as if your explanation could make
your deeds more eloquent! George Henry Moore was no wrathful and
haughty Mitchel, no gay and heroic Tone, but he was a very worthy and
gallant figure in his time, and might have served Ireland well if he had
learned to know her sooner.

(OCTOBER 1913)

It is not amusing to be hungry; at least (for I desire to be moderate in
my language), it is not very amusing. Though hunger be proverbially good
sauce, one may have too much
of it, as of most good things; and, while meat without sauce is
tolerable, sauce without meat is apt to pall. Yorkshire Relish (I am
told) is delicious, but one would not care to dine upon it. Hunger Sauce
must be still less sustaining. Indeed, the only advantage that Hunger
Sauce seems to possess over other brands is its extreme cheapness. The
very poorest can enjoy it, and it is one of the few luxuries that the
rich will not grudge them. But, as far as nutritious properties are
concerned, the cakes recommended by Marie Antoinette to the starving
peasants of France, in lieu of bread, were preferable. Why are the
people crying?Your Majesty, they have no bread.But why not eat
cake? asked the Queen.

Poor Marie Antoinette did not quite grasp the situation in France. In
the end they grasped her and hurried her to the guillotine. If Marie
Antoinette could have got at the peasant's point of view there might
have been no French Revolution. There are only two ways of righting
wrongs: reform and revolution. Reform is possible when those who
inflict the wrong can be got to see
things from the point of view of those who suffer the wrong. Some men
can see from other men's points of view by sympathy; most men cannot
until you actually put them in the other men's shoes. I would like to
put some of our well-fed citizens in the shoes of our hungry citizens,
just for an experiment. I would try the hunger cure upon them. It is
known that hunger is a good sauce; it is also known that what is sauce
for the goose is sauce for the gander. It is further known that a pound
a week is sufficient to sustain a Dublin family in honest hunger—at least very rich men tell us so, and very rich men know all about
everything, from art galleries to the domestic economy of the tenement
room. I would ask those who know that a man can live and thrive, can
house, feed, clothe, and educate a large family on a pound a week to try
the experiment themselves. Let them show us how the thing is done. We
will allow them a pound a week for the sustenance of themselves and
their families, and will require them to hand over their surplus income,
over and above a pound a week, to some benevolent object. I am quite
certain that they will enjoy their poverty and
their hunger. They will go about with beaming faces; they will wear
spruce and well-brushed clothes; they will drink their black tea with
gusto and masticate their dry bread scientifically (Lady Aberdeen will
tell them the proper number of bites per slice); they will write books
on How to be Happy though Hungry; when their children cry for more
food they will smile; when their landlord calls for the rent they will
embrace him; when their house falls upon them they will thank God; when
policemen smash in their skulls they will kiss the chastening baton.
They will do all these things—perhaps; in the alternative they may come
to see that there is something to be said for the hungry man's hazy idea
that there is something wrong somewhere.

It is, of course, easy for me, a well-fed hermit, to write with
detachment about hunger. It is always easy for well-fed persons to take
detached views of such things; indeed, sometimes the views of the
well-fed on these matters are so detached from their subject as to have
no relation to it at all. If I were hungry, I should probably
write with a little more passion than I am displaying. Indeed, if I were
as hungry at this moment as many equally good men of Ireland undoubtedly
are, it is probable that I should not be sitting here wielding this pen;
possibly I should be in the streets wielding a paving-stone. I frankly
admit that I am well-fed; but you must not imagine me a sybarite. Being
a hermit, I limit myself to four square meals a day, except on
feast-days when, for the greater glory of God, I allow myself five. If I
were not thus explicit my views on economic questions might be
discounted; I should be described as belonging to the lowest stratum of
society, and therefore not in any real sense a member of society, or
indeed of the human race, at all; it would be hinted that I am a
loafer, that I frequent street corners, that I am a socialist, a
syndicalist, and other weird things. I once took a modest part in
breaking up a meeting in the Antient Concert Rooms. The next day the
Independent called me an unwashed youth. A youth I certainly was, but
I had washed myself with scrupulous care that blessed morning; indeed,
it is my habit to wash myself in the
mornings. A distinguished
scholar (now a Professor of the National University) and a distinguished
woman of letters (now prominent in the counsels of the United
Irishwomen) were beside me on that occasion, and they, too, were
described as unwashed youths: the words of both sexes were
added, lest it might be left open to inference that even the ladies who
disagree with the Independent are so virtuous as to wash themselves.
When, therefore, you differ in opinion from a newspaper it is always
well to let it be known that you wash yourself regularly, that you take
the normal number of meals, that you pay your rent and taxes, that you
go to church or chapel, and that, in short, you conform in all
particulars to the lofty standard of conduct set up by such an eminent
fellow-citizen of yours as Mr. William M. Murphy.

Personally, I am in a position to protest my respectability. I do all
the orthodox things. My wild oats were sown and reaped years ago. I am
nothing so new-fangled as a socialist or a syndicalist. I am
old fashioned enough to be both a Catholic and
Nationalist. I am not smarting under any burning personal wrong except
the personal wrong I endure in being a member of an enslaved nation. I
am at peace with all the men of Ireland. It becomes both my character
and my profession to be at peace with my fellow-slaves, whether
capitalist or worker, whether rich or poor, whether fed or hungry. God
knows that we, poor remnant of a gallant nation, endure enough shame in
common to make us brothers. And yet here is a matter in which I cannot
rest neutral. My instinct is with the landless man against the lord of
lands, and with the breadless man against the master of millions. I may
be wrong, but I do hold it a most terrible sin that there should be
landless men in this island of waste yet fertile valleys, and that there
should be breadless men in this city where great fortunes are made and
enjoyed.

I calculate that one-third of the people of Dublin are underfed; that
half the children attending Irish primary schools are ill-nourished.
Inspectors of the National Board will tell you that there is no use in
visiting primary schools in Ireland after one or two
in the afternoon: the children are too weak and drowsy with hunger
to be capable of answering intelligently. I suppose there are twenty
thousand families in Dublin in whose domestic economy milk and butter
are all but unknown: black tea and dry bread are their staple articles
of diet. There are many thousand fireless hearth-places in Dublin on the
bitterest days of winter; there would be many thousand more only for
such bodies as the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Twenty thousand
Dublin families live in one-room tenements. It is common to find two or
three families occupying the same room; and sometimes one of the
families will have a lodger! There are tenement rooms in Dublin in
which over a dozen persons live, eat, and sleep. High rents are paid for
these rooms, rents which in cities like Birmingham would command neat
four-roomed cottages with gardens. The tenement houses of Dublin are so
rotten that they periodically collapse upon their inhabitants, and if
the inhabitants collect in the streets to discuss matters the police
baton them to death.

These are among the grievances against which men in Dublin are beginning
to protest. Can you wonder that protest is at last made? Can you wonder
that the protest is crude and bloody? I do not know whether the methods
of Mr. James Larkin are wise methods or unwise methods (unwise, I think,
in some respects), but this I know, that here is a most hideous wrong to
be righted, and that the man who attempts honestly to right it is a
good man and a brave man.

Poverty, starvation, social unrest, crime, are incidental to the
civilisation of such states as England and America, where immense masses
of people are herded into great Christless cities and the bodies and
souls of men are exploited in the interests of wealth. But these
conditions do no to any extent exist in Ireland. We have not great
cities; we have not dense industrial populations; we have hardly any
ruthless capitalists exploiting immense masses of men. Yet in Ireland we
have dire and desperate poverty; we have starvation; we have social
unrest. Ireland is capable of feeding twenty million
people; we are barely four million. Why do so many of us starve?

Before God, I believe that the root of the matter lies in foreign
domination. A free Ireland would not, and could not, have hunger in her
fertile vales and squalor in her cities. Ireland has resources to feed
five times her population: a free Ireland would make those resources
available. A free Ireland would drain the bogs, would harness the
rivers, would plant the wastes, would nationalise the railways and
waterways, would improve agriculture, would protect fisheries, would
foster industries, would promote commerce, would diminish extravagant
expenditure (as on needless judges and policemen), would beautify the
cities, would educate the workers (and also the non-workers, who stand
in direr need of it), would, in short, govern herself as no external
power—nay, not even a government of angels and archangels— could govern
her. For freedom is the condition of sane life, and in slavery, if we
have not death, we have the more evil thing which the poet has named
Death-in-Life. The most awful wars are the wars that take
place in dead or quasi-dead bodies when the fearsome things that death
breeds go forth to prey upon one another and upon the body that is their
parent.

(NOVEMBER 1913)

There are incongruities which are humorous, and there are incongruities
which are disgusting. All humour has its source in incongruity, but so
has all sin. Sometimes the humour of an incongruity is so great that we
overlook the fact of its wickedness; sometimes the wickedness of an
incongruity is so apparent that only a saint can laugh at its humour
(for your saint laughs at things whereat your man of less sanctity,
which means of less charity and less humility, is scandalised). There
are obvious incongruities at which everyone, from a saint to a
solicitor, will at least smile. Thus, when one hears a noble air of
Gounod's sung to such words as My wife stole a hell of a lump of beef;
when one meets an archbishop in gaiters wheeling a perambulator
containing his offspring, when one comes upon a bull in a china shop or upon a member of the Chamber of Commerce in an art
gallery, one smiles no matter how respectable one is. No question of
ethics enters into these cases. It is a pity that a Gounod march should
be sung to profane words; but Gounod would suffer no diminution of just
fame if all the kleptomaniac exploits of all the wives of the world were
chanted to his music. One may have rigid ideas as to the impropriety of
archbishops wheeling their offspring in perambulators—and it is
certainly going too far to wear gaiters while doing so unarchiepiscopal
a thing; but it is not a very serious sin, if sin at all. A bull in a
china shop may break a good deal of crockery, but he can hardly break
any of the Commandments; and a member of the Chamber of Commerce in an
art gallery will not do the pictures any harm, nor, unless he be as
sensitive as some Gaelic Leaguers I have known (and that is impossible),
will the pictures do him any harm. In these instances nothing suffers
but the Law of Congruity; and laws have made somany people suffer that one can well tolerate the notion of a law
suffering once in a way.

But there are incongruities which disgust, or at any rate ought to
disgust. A millionaire promoting Universal Peace is such an incongruity;
an employer who accepts the aid of foreign bayonets to enforce a
lock-out of his workmen and accuses the workmen of national dereliction
because they accept foreign alms for their starving wives and children,
is such an incongruity; a public body in an enslaved country which
passes a resolution congratulating a citizen upon selling himself to the
enemies of that country, and upon making a good bargain of it, is such
an incongruity; an Irish Nationalist, unable to pull the trigger of a
gun himself, who sneers at the drillings and rifle-practices of
Orangemen, is such an incongruity. The Eastern and the Western Worlds are
indeed full of incongruities of this sort; each of them matter for a
play by a Synge.

To dilate a little on one of them. It is now the creed of Irish
nationalism (or at least of that Irish nationalism which is vocal on platforms and in the press) that the possession of arms and a knowledge
of the use of arms is a fit subject for satire. To have a rifle is as
ridiculous as to have a pimple at the end of your nose, or a bailiff
waiting for you round the corner. To be able to use a rifle is an
accomplishment as futile as to be able to stand on your head to be able
to wag your ears. This is not the creed of any other nationalism that
exists or has ever existed in any community, civilised or uncivilised,
that has ever inhabited the globe. It has never been the creed of Irish
nationalism until this our day. Mitchel and the great confessors of
Irish nationalism would have laughed it to scorn. Mitchel, indeed, did
laugh to scorn a similar but much less foolish doctrine of O'Connell's;
and the generation that came after O'Connell rejected his doctrine and
accepted Mitchel's. The present generation of Irish Nationalists is not
only unfamiliar with arms but despises all who are familiar with arms.
Irish Nationalists share with certain millionaires the distinction of
being the only people who believe in Universal Peace—here and now. Even
the Socialists who want Universal Peace propose
to reach it by Universal War; and so far they are sensible.

It is symptomatic of the attitude of the Irish Nationalist that when he
ridicules the Orangeman he ridicules him not for his numerous foolish
beliefs, but for his readiness to fight in defence of those beliefs. But
this is exactly wrong. The Orangeman is ridiculous in so far as he
believes incredible things; he is estimable in so far as he is willing
and able to fight in defence of what he believes. It is foolish of an
Orangeman to believe that his personal liberty is threatened by Home
Rule; but, granting that he believes that, it is not only in the highest
degree common sense but it is his clear duty to arm in defence of his
threatened liberty. Personally, I think the Orangeman with a rifle a much
less ridiculous figure than the Nationalist without a rifle; and the
Orangeman who can fire a gun will certainly count for more in the end
than the Nationalist who can do nothing cleverer than make a pun. The
superseded Italian rifles which the Orangemen have imported may not be
very dangerous weapons; but at least they are
more dangerous than epigrams. When the Orangemen " line the last ditch"
they may make a very sorry show; but we shall make an even sorrier show,
for we shall have to get Gordon Highlanders to line the ditch for us.

I am not defending the Orangeman; I am only showing that his
condemnation does not lie in the mouth of an unarmed Nationalist. The
Orangeman is a sufficiently funny person; and he is funny mainly because
he is so serious. He has no sense of incongruity; in his mind's eye he
sees without smiling Cardinal Logue sending Protestant worthies to the
stake and Sir Edward Carson undergoing the fatigues of a
campaign—things which will never be. At least, I think not; for
Cardinal Logue is kindly and humorous, and Sir Edward Carson is a lawyer
with a price. The Orangeman's lack of a sense of the incongruous is
sometimes painful. In Belfast they are selling chair cushions with Sir
Edward Carson's head embroidered upon them; which is pretty much as if a
man were to emblazon the arms of his country upon the seat of his
trousers. One should not put a sacred emblem where it is certain
to be sat upon and liable to be kicked; and only Orangemen would think
of honouring their chief by sitting on his head.

But the rifles of the Orangemen give dignity even to their folly. The
rifles are bound to be useful some day. At the worst they may hasten Sir
Edward Carson's final exit from Ulster; at the best they may crack
outside Dublin Castle. The Editor of

Sinn Féin wrote the other day that
when the Orangemen fire upon the King of England's troops it will become
the duty of every Nationalist in Ireland to join them: there is a deal
of wisdom in the thought as well as a deal of humour. Or negotiations
might be opened with the Orangemen on these lines: You are erecting a
Provisional Government of Ulster—make it a Provisional Government of
Ireland and we will recognise and obey it. O'Connell said long ago that
he would rather be ruled by the old Protestant Ascendancy Irish
Parliament than by the Union Parliament; " and O'Connell was right,"
said Mitchel. He certainly was. It is unquestionable that Sir Edward
Carson's Provisional Government would govern Ireland better than
she has been governed by the English Cabinet; at any rate, it could not
well govern her worse. Any six Irishmen would be a better Government of
Ireland than the English Cabinet has been: any six criminals from
Mountjoy Prison, any six lunatics from the Richmond Asylum, any six
Orangemen from Portadown. The Irishmen would at least try to govern
Ireland in the interests of Irish criminals, lunatics, or Orangemen, as
the case might be: the English have governed her in the interests of
England. Better exploit Ireland for the benefit of Belfast than exploit
her for the benefit of Westminster. Better wipe out Ireland in one
year's civil war than let England slowly bleed her to death.

A rapprochement between Orangemen and Nationalists would be difficult.
The chief obstacles are the Orangeman's lack of humour and the
Nationalist's lack of guns: each would be at a disadvantage in a
conference. But a sense of humour can be cultivated, and guns can be
purchased. One great source of misunderstanding has now disappeared: it
has become clear within the last few years that the Orangeman is no more
loyal to England than we are. He wants the Union because he imagines
that it secures his prosperity; but he is ready to fire on the Union
flag the moment it threatens his prosperity. The position is perfectly
plain and understandable. Foolish notions of loyalty to England being
eliminated, it is a matter for business-like negotiation. A Nationalist
mission to North-East Ulster would possibly effect some good. The case
might be put thus: Hitherto England has governed Ireland through the
Orange Lodges; she now proposes to govern Ireland through the A. O.
H. You object: so do we. Why not unite and get rid of the English? They
are the real difficulty; their presence here the real incongruity.

(DECEMBER 1913)

I was once stranded on a desert island with a single companion. When two
people are stranded on a desert island they naturally converse. We
conversed. We sat on a
stony beach and talked for hours. When we had exhausted all the
unimportant subjects either of us could think of, we commenced to talk
about important subjects. (I have observed that even
on a desert island it is not considered good form to talk of important
things while unimportant things remain to be discussed.) We had very
different points of views, and very different temperaments. I was a boy;
my companion was an old man. I was about to enter the most wicked of all
professions; my companion was a priest. Being young, I was serious and
conceited; being old, my companion was gay and humble. In some respects
I was more learned than he: he was trying to spell his way through
Keatings

Trí Bior-Ghaoithe an Bháis, and I was able to help him. But in
every respect he was wiser beyond telling than I, for his life had been
stormy and sorrowful, and withal very saintly, so that he had garnered
much of the wisdom both of heaven and of earth; and I had garnered only
the wisdom of the Board of Intermediate Education. We were thus as
singularly ill-assorted a pair as ever sat down together on the beach of
a desert island.

Yet we had one interest in common. There was at the bottom of my heart a
memory which a course of Intermediate education (by some miracle of
God's) had not altogether obliterated. I had heard in childhood of the
Fenians from one who, although a woman, had shared their hopes and
disappointment. The names of Stephens and O'Donovan Rossa were familiar
to me, and they seemed to me the most gallant of all names: names which
should be put into songs and sung proudly to tramping music. Indeed, my
mother (although she was not old enough to remember the Fenians) used to
sing of them in words learned, I daresay, from that other who had known
them; one of her songs had the lines—
Because I was O'Donovan Rossa,And a son of Gráinne Mhaol
and although I did not quite know who O'Donovan Rossa was or what
his deed had been, I felt that he must have been a gallant and
kingly man and his deed a man's deed. Alice Milligan had not yet made
the ballad
of

Owen Who Died, which was to give these heroic names a place in
literature—
You have heard of O'Donovan RossaFrom nigh Skibbereen;You have heard o' the Hawk 'o the Hill-top,If you have not seen;You have heard of the Reaper whose reapingWas of grain half green:Such were the men among usIn the days that have been.

None of my school-fellows had ever heard of those names; and if our
masters had heard them they never mentioned them. O'Connell we heard
about; and one day that stands out in my memory, Parnell's name was
mentioned, for a master came into the room and said: Well, boys, they
say Parnell is dead—the dirty fellow. We all grew very still, for we
were all Parnellites; and we wondered why he should be called a dirty
fellow, and thought it a cruel thing. That was before the Juggernaut car
of the Intermediate had rolled over us, and we still retained most of
the decent kindly instincts with which we had been born. Had it happened
four years later we should probably
have applauded the master's announcement as rather neatly put.

But behold me on the beach of my desert island with my priest beside me.
And my priest, as I found out when we began to talk about serious
things, had known the Fenians, had made something of a stir in Fenian
times, had even been called the Fenian priest! I do not know whether he
had ever been a Fenian; but I know that all the Fenians of a countryside
used to go to confession to him in preference to their own parish
priests; and it was said that he had a Sodality of the Sacred Heart
composed to a man of sworn Fenians: probably an exaggeration. But this I
can vouch for, that he loved the name and fame of the Fenians, and he
spoke to me, till his voice grew husky and his eyes filled with tears,
of their courage, of their loyalty, of their enthusiasm, of their hope,
of their failure. Stephens should have given the word, he said;
we'll never be as ready as we were the night he escaped from Richmond
Prison. We've lost our manhood since. It was the first year of the Boer
War. Look at the chance we have now, he
exclaimed: the British army at the other end of the earth, and
one blow would give us Ireland; but we've neither men nor guns. GOD
ALMIGHTY WON'T GO ON GIVING US CHANCES if we let every chance slip. You
can't expect He'll give us more chances than He gave the Jews. He'll
turn His back on us. … And why, he added, should a lot of old women
be free, anyhow? The worthy man had not considered the Suffragist
claim; or perhaps he would have allowed freedom to bona fide old women
and denied it to old-womanlike young men—in which he would have been
right.

For, after all, may it not be said with entire truth that the reason why
Ireland is not free is that Ireland has not deserved to be free? Men
who have ceased to be men cannot claim the rights of men; and men who
have suffered themselves to be deprived of their manhood have suffered
the greatest of all indignities and deserved the most shameful of all
penalties. It has been sung in savage and exultant verse of a fierce
Western clan that its men allowed themselves to be deprived of their
sight by a
triumphant foe rather than be deprived of their manhood; and it was a
man's choice. But modern Irishmen with eyes open have allowed themselves
to be deprived of their manhood; and many of them have reached the
terrible depth of degradation in which a man will boast of his
unmanliness. For in suffering ourselves to be disarmed, in acquiescing
in a perpetual disarmament, in neglecting every chance of arming, in
sneering (as all Nationalists do now) at those who have taken arms, we
in effect abnegate our manhood. Unable to exercise men's rights, we do
not deserve men's privileges. We are, in a strict sense, not fit for
freedom, and freedom we shall never attain.

It is not reasonable to expect that the Almighty will repeal all the
laws of His universe in our behalf. The condition on which freedom is
given to men is that they are able to make good their claim to it; and
unarmed men cannot make good their claim to anything which armed men
choose to deny them. One of the sins against faith is presumption, which
is defined as a foolish expectation of salvation without making use
of the necessary means to obtain it: surely it is a sin against national
faith to expect national freedom without adopting the necessary means to
win and keep it. And I know of no other way than the way of the sword:
history records no other, reason and experience suggest no other. When
I say the sword I do not mean necessarily the actual use of the sword: I
mean readiness and ability to use the sword. Which, translated into
terms of modern life, means readiness and ability to shoot.

I regard the armed Orangemen of North-East Ulster as potentially the
most useful body of citizens Ireland possesses. In fact, they are the
only citizens Ireland does possess at this moment: the rest of us for
the most part do not count. A citizen who cannot vindicate his
citizenship is a contradiction in terms. A citizen without arms is like
a priest without religion, like a woman without chastity, like a man
without manhood. The very conception of an unarmed citizen is a purely
modern one, and even in modern times it is chiefly confined to the
populations of the (so-called) British Islands. Most other
peoples, civilised and uncivilised, are armed. This is a truth which we
of Ireland must grasp. We must try to realise that we are collectively
and individually living in a state of degradation as long as we remain
unarmed. I do not content myself with saying in general terms that the
Irish should arm. I say to each one of you who read this that it is YOUR
duty to arm. Until you have armed yourself and made yourself skilful in
the use of your arms you have no right to a voice in any concern of the
Irish Nation, no right to consider yourself a member of the Irish Nation
or of any nation; no right to raise your head among any body of decent
men. Arm. If you cannot arm otherwise than by joining Carson's
Volunteers, join Carson's Volunteers. But you can, for instance, start
Volunteers of your own.

My priest on my desert island spoke to me glowingly about the Three who
died at Manchester. He spoke to me, too, of the rescue of Kelly and
Deasy from the prison van and of the ring of armed Fenians keeping the
Englishry at bay. I have often thought that that was the most memorable
moment
in recent Irish history: and that that ring of Irishmen spitting
fire from revolver barrels, while an English mob cowered out of range,
might well serve as a symbol of the Ireland that should be; of the
Ireland that shall be. Next Sunday we shall pay homage to them and to
their deed; were it not a fitting day for each of us to resolve that we,
too, will be men.

(JANUARY 1914)

It has penetrated to this quiet place that some of the young men of
Ireland have banded themselves together under the noble name of Irish
Volunteers with intent to arm in their country's service. I am inclined
to doubt the rumour. It has an air of inherent improbability. I could
have believed such a report of any generation of young Irishmen of which
I have read; but of the generation that I have known I hesitate to
believe it. It is not like what they would do. Previous generations of
young Irishmen (if what our fathers have told us be true) were foolish
and
hot-headed, not to say wicked and irreligious. Of course, they had not
been properly instructed. Intermediate Boards and National Universities
were yet in the womb of the British Government. The expansive power of
gunpowder and the immense momentum which can be acquired by a bullet
discharged from a gun were not generally known until Natural Philosophy
became a subject for Matriculation, and Kennedy published a
one-and-sixpenny text-book on the subject: hence our forefathers did
not realise how dangerous it is to let off firearms—how could they be
expected to? This fact, not hitherto adverted to by historians, goes
far to explain the otherwise inexplicable action of the Volunteers of
1778, of the insurgents of 1798, of the Fenians of 1867; men, apparently
sane, who expended quite a lot of money on buying or manufacturing
deadly arms. Had they realised that the weapons might kill the poor
soldiers who were guarding their country, it is unquestionable that they
would not have been so inhumane as to procure them. Again, former
generations of young Irishmen had no sound notions as to what is proper
and gentlemanly. They always
failed to recognise that it is not respectable to get yourself
hanged, and could never be got to see that prison clothes, no matter how
well-made, are not becoming. Robert Emmet was actually guilty of the
impropriety of smiling on the scaffold; and surely it was very near
blasphemy for three Irish murderers, with manacled hands uplifted from
an English dock, to call upon God to save Ireland—as if that were
not the job of the British Government.

Fortunately, we live in a more cultured as well as in a more religious
age. We have studied Dynamics and know that firearms are dangerous; we
have studied Political Economy and know that it is bad economy to expend
money upon a national armament, seeing that we already pay the British
Army to fight for us; we have studied Ethics and know that it is
unlawful to rise against an established government. We have also
cultivated a sense of decorum and a sense of humour. We see that
militarism is not only wrong but, what is worse, ridiculous; and we
should (very properly) hesitate to go out
drilling lest they might put a caricature us in

Punch.

My knowledge that all this is so makes me doubt the rumour that a
considerable number of young Irishmen have resolved to take arms and to
train themselves in the use of arms. The improbability is increased when
I come to examine the details of the report. Thus, a Provisional
Committee including university professors, schoolmasters, solicitors,
barristers, journalists, aldermen, public servants, commercial men, and
gentlemen of leisure, is spoken of. I have never known persons of that
sort to do anything more exciting than talk over tea and scones in the
D. B. C. There are among those classes in Dublin many who are quite
fearless—in debate; many who are extraordinarily prompt—in retort; a
few who are really able and vigorous—in smashing their opponents'
arguments. That such men would turn aside from the realities of dialectics to the theatricalities of military
preparation seems highly unprobable. When it is added that the
Provisional Committee includes United Irish Leaguers, Hibernians, Sinn
Féiners, Gaelic
Leaguers, and even a few who call themselves simply Separatists, the
untruth of the whole story becomes almost manifest; for it is well known
that there never has been and that there never can be anything like
cordial co-operation between such widely-differing sections of
politicians and non-politicians in Ireland. I dismiss therefore the tale
of a huge tumultuous meeting of seven or eight thousand people in the
largest hall in Dublin, with immense overflow meetings in neighbouring
buildings and gardens; the detailed accounts of nightly drillings in
various halls; the absurd rumour that Galway (well known to have no
other interest than racing, fishing, and British tourists) and Cork
(which is prepared to fight all Ireland on the question of conciliation)
have flung themselves into the movement; and finally the grotesque fable
that young men who are eating their way to the bar or preparing to
purchase dispensary appointments from Boards of Guardians have paused in
their honourable careers in order to learn how to shoot. These things
have happened in other countries and in other times; but surely not in
our own country and in our own time.

Consider the dislocating effect of such a movement. In the first place,
it would make Home Rule, now about to be abandoned in deference to armed
Ulster, almost a certainty; in a second place, should Home Rule
miscarry, it would give us a policy to fall back upon. Again, it would
make men and citizens of us, whereas we are quite comfortable as old
women and slaves. Furthermore, it would unite us in one all-Ireland
movement of brotherly co-operation, whereas
we derive infinite pleasure from quarrelling with one another. The
comfortable feeling that we are safe behind the guns of the British
Army, like an infant in its mother's arms, the precious liberty of
confuting one another before the British public and thus gaining
empire-wide reputations for caustic Celtic humour and brilliant Celtic
repartee—these are things that we will not lightly sacrifice. For these
privileges have we not cheerfully allowed our population to be halved
and our taxation to be quadrupled? Enough said. Volunteering is
undesirable. Volunteering is impossible. Volunteering is dangerous.

(JANUARY 1914)

It would appear that the impossible has happened (as, indeed, when one
comes to think of the matter, it nearly always does),
and that the young men of Ireland are learning again the noble trade
of arms. They had almost forgotten that it was a noble trade; and when
the young men of a nation have reached so terrible a depth as to be
unconscious of the dignity of arms, one will naturally doubt their
capacity for any virile thought, let alone any virile action. Hence my
scepticism of last month. I who am as a babe, believing all things and
hoping all things, felt it difficult to believe this. One is
disillusioned so often. Once when I was a boy a ballad-singer came to
the farmhouse in which I was living for a time in a glen of the Dublin
hills. He had ballads of Bold Robert Emmet and Here's a Song for
Young Wolfe Tone; and he told me that in secret places of the hills
Fenians had drilled and, for all he knew, were drilling
still. So I fared forth in quest of them, trudging along mountain roads
at night, full of the faith that in some moonlit glen I should come upon
the Fenians drilling. But I never found them. Nowhere beneath the moon
were there armed men wheeling and marching. The mountains were lonely.
When I came home I said to my grandfather (who had himself been a Fenian,
albeit I knew it not), The Fenians are all dead.Oh, be the! said he
(his oaths never got further than be the), how do you know
that?I have gone through all the glens,I answered, and
there were none drilling: they must be dead.

And my naive deduction was very nearly right. If the Fenians were
not all dead, the Fenian spirit was dead, or almost dead. By the Fenian
spirit I mean not so much the spirit of a particular generation as that
virile fighting faith which has been the salt of all the generations in
Ireland unto this last. And is it here even in this last? Yea, its
seeds are here, and behold they are kindling: it is for you and me to
fan them into such a flame as shall consume everything that is
mean and compromising and insincere in Ireland and in each man of
Ireland—for in every one of us there is much that is mean and
compromising and insincere, much that were better burned out. When we
stand armed as Volunteers we shall at least be men, and so shall be able
to come into communion of thought and action with the virile generations
of Ireland: to our betterment, be sure.

The only question that need trouble us now is this: Will the young men
of Ireland rise to the opportunity that is given them? They have a year
before them: the momentous year of 1914. The fate of the Irish movement
in our time will very likely be determined during the coming twelve
months, and it will be determined largely by the way in which the
Volunteer movement develops. In other words, it will depend upon the
young men who have volunteered, for they have the making of the movement
in their hands. This is a problem in which the British Government is not
a factor; in which the Irish leaders—Parliamentarian, Sinn Féin,
Separatist, Gaelic League—are not factors; the young men of the towns
and
countrysides are the only factors; they and whatever manly stuff is in
them. It is a great opportunity for the young men of a people to get. A
year is theirs in which to make history.

A former generation of Irishmen got such a year and used it well. An
army of 1OO,OOO drilled and equipped men was its glorious fruit. Can we
of the twentieth century work to similar purpose and with similar result
during the year that has been given to us? I believe we can. There are
circumstances which seem to me to make our task easier than theirs.

In the first place, we are poorer than they were. Therefore we shall be
more generous. There were many men of money among the Volunteers of
1778-83: it was one of the weaknesses of the movement. Those who have
are always inclined to hold; always afraid to risk. No good cause in
Ireland appeals for help in vain, provided those to whom it appeals are
sufficiently poor. The young men who, I imagine, are volunteering to-day
are for the most part poor: being
poor, they will know how to save and pinch and scrape until each man
of them has a rifle and a uniform. There are those among them who will
give up tobacco for a spell, or at any rate reduce their consumption of
tobacco; who will become total abstainers for a while; who will renounce
betting; who will go less frequently to theatres, to music-halls, to
picture-houses; who will dispense with all their little luxuries and
rise above all their little follies, to the sole end that they may have,
each man of them, before the year is out, a Volunteer rifle on his
shoulder and a Volunteer coat on his back. Note well the companies: I
prophesy that it is not the companies which draw their recruits from the
most prosperous quarters that will be soonest equipped; not the
sleekest-looking men that will first shoulder rifles. When you are
starting upon any noble enterprise, it is a great thing to start poor.
Wolfe Tone, reaching France with a hundred guineas in his pocket, sent
three fleets against England. James Stephens with ninety pounds in hand
embarked upon the organisation of the Fenians.

In the second place, this is a movement of the people, not of the
leaders. The leaders in Ireland have nearly always left the people at
the critical moment; have sometimes sold them. The former Volunteer
movement was abandoned by its leaders; hence its ultimate failure.
Grattan led the van of the Volunteers, but he also led the retreat
of the leaders; O'Connell recoiled before the cannon at Clontarf; twice
the hour of the Irish Revolution struck during Young Ireland days, and
twice it struck in vain, for Meagher hesitated in Waterford, Duffy and
McGee hesitated in Dublin. Stephens refused to give the word in '65;
he never came in '66 or '67. I do not blame these men: you or I might
have done the same. It is a terrible responsibility to be cast upon a
man, that of bidding the cannon speak and the grapeshot pour. But in
this Volunteer movement, as I understand it, the people are to be
master; and it will be for the people to say when and against whom the
Volunteers shall draw the sword and point the rifle. Now, my reading of
Irish history is that, however the leaders may have failed, the
instinct of the people has
always been unerring. The Volunteers themselves, the people themselves,
must keep control of this movement. Any man or any group of men that
seeks to establish an ascendancy should be dealt with summarily: such
traitors to the Volunteer spirit would deserve to be shot, but it will be
sufficient if they be shot out.

In the third place, the young men of Ireland have been to school to the
Gaelic League. Herein it seems to me lies the fact which chiefly
distinguishes this generation from the other revolutionary generations
of the last century and a half: from the Volunteer generation of 1778,
from the United Irish generation of 1798, from the Young Ireland
generation of 1848, from the Fenian generation of 1867. We have known
the Gaelic League, and
Lo, a clearness of vision has followed, lo, a purification of sight.
I do not think we shall be as liable to make blunders, to pursue side
issues, to mistake shadows for substance, to overlook essentials,
to neglect details on the one hand or to get lost in them on the other,
as were previous generations of perhaps better men. It is not merely (or
at all) that we have now a theory of nationality by which to correct our
instinct: indeed, I doubt if a theory of nationality be a very great
gain, and plainly the instinct of the Fenian artisan was a finer thing
than the soundest theory of the Gaelic League professor. It is rather
that we have got into a fuller communion with what is most racy in our
past: our ancestors have spoken to us anew. In a deeper sense than
before we realise that Ireland is ours and that we are Ireland's. Our
country wears to us a new aspect, and yet she is her most ancient self.
We are as men who, having wandered long through the devious ways of a
forest, see again the familiar hills and fields bathed in the light of
heaven, ancient yet ever-new. And we rejoice in our hearts, and bless
the goodly sun.